Project Goal

Spurred by a lifelong fascination with animals, Rory has spent three decades inventing dozens of devices to monitor animal behaviour.

Rory Wilson‘s revolutionary technology, for which he won a Rolex Award in 2006, has been long in development. Born in 1957, the British zoologist, a professor of aquatic biology at the Institute of Environmental Sustainability at Swansea University in Wales, has spent three decades inventing dozens of devices to monitor animal behaviour.

The award-winning “daily diary”, which measures an animal’s energy expenditure, is an outgrowth of these inventions and Wilson’s lifelong fascination with animals. His childhood captivation with penguins led to a master’s in zoology from Oxford and, later, a Ph.D.

Wilson attributes his daily diary’s success to the Award funding and recognition. To date, he has deployed the daily diary on more than 40 species, and conservation initiatives are starting up globally as a result of his work.

Among his goals is to set up a database of daily-diary data so that scientists worldwide can understand changes in animal biology over time.